An 18-year-old college freshman finishes her final mid-term.
Exhausted but excited, she walks to the parking lot and spots her already packed sedan and gets in to head out for spring break. She pulls away from campus and places her car into autonomous mode.
Wanting to let her friends know she is on her way, she reaches into her purse to grab her cell phone and starts sending a text. In what feels like an instant later, she squints open her eyes to the harsh fluorescent bulb above as a nurse tells her she was in an accident. In those few seconds she took her eyes off the road, trusting her safety to her car's "autonomy," an SUV broadsided her at an intersection at 50 miles per hour.
|New era changes notions of liability
Fortunately, this account is fictitious, but the scenario exemplifies how, from a legal perspective, the autonomous vehicle era will change notions of liability where even the distracted driver is not necessarily at-fault. There will be a whole new playbook, new theories of liability, and human vs. machine accounts that amount to "he said, it said."
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